Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/CUBA: Exhibit Seeks to Capture the Spirit of the 1960s

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Aug 10 2004 (IPS) - A tailored skirt, hand bags and other women’s accessories – the latest fashions of the 1960s – are on exhibit in the museum alongside the uniforms of the Cuban government’s literacy drive from the period: olive green hats and a grey shirt which could well be that of a sugar-cane cutter.

“It’s incredible – I had a handbag like that at home and I gave it to my daughter to play with. Now I realise it is an object that could actually be on display in a museum,” said an Argentine tourist, after touching the cloth of a uniform with curiosity.

She was visiting an exhibit in Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts, which takes a nostalgic but reflective and critical look back at the 1960s and the significance of that era.

“Remembering is not reliving,” wrote the museum director Moraima Clavijo in the brochure for “the cultural anthology of a decade” in the “Mirar a los 60” (Looking at the ’60s) exhibit, which opened in Havana in early July and runs through Aug. 31.

The display of posters, photographs and other articles from the period complements the museum’s permanent exhibition of works of art, a film, music and dance programme, and the publication of a 99-page book.

The book includes sections on painting, photography, architecture, humour, music, theatre, dance, film and literature, written by leading intellectuals like the musicologist María Teresa Linares and essayist Ambrosio Fornet.

Just inside the entrance to the museum is a display showing the designs placed on billboards for the 1970 sugar harvest. Ten designs for ten million tons of sugar – a target that was not reached and that, for many analysts, marked the end of the first stage of the Cuban revolution that began with the Jan. 1, 1959 triumph of the guerrilla army led by President Fidel Castro.

Amongst the most impressive works are a mural painted in Havana in July 1967 by nearly 100 painters from Europe, Latin America and Cuba, during the first presentation by Paris’s May Salon in the Americas.

“Los miércoles también quieren vivir” (Wednesdays Also Want to Live), “La poesía sangra” (Poetry is Bleeding), “Ven pronto Fidel” (Come Quickly Fidel), “Con la Revolución hasta Marte” (With the Revolution to Mars), can be read on the colossal work which brings together the diverse artistic tendencies of the period.

There is also a special issue of the Cuban newspaper “La Gaceta de Cuba” dedicated to U.S. writer William Faulkner, dating from July 1962, which includes an article by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Cuban writer now living in exile who is an outspoken critic of the Castro government.

The 1960s was a “prodigious decade” that “appeared to exhaust the repertoire of options in many fields of human activity,” stated Fornet in his introduction to the Fine Arts Museum collection of articles.

These were the years of the Beatles, the anti-Vietnam war peace movement, hippies and the first man on the moon, but also of the Tlatelolco square massacre of student protesters in Mexico and the death of legendary Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in Bolivia.

According to Fornet, “the first contribution of Cuban thought to the culture of the 1960s is rooted in our conviction that this decade began in 1959,” with the triumph of the revolution.

“Our whole history started to spin on an axis that went back to the dramatic extremes of before and after…As a nation we had suddenly recovered our sanity: the world could be changed and we, ourselves, could change in the process too,” he wrote.

“The impossible is possible. We, the mad, are sane,” Cuban national hero José Martí once wrote. This rarely quoted phrase is now recorded by Fornet in his personal account of those early days of the revolution.

There were radical changes in Cuba in all spheres of life: women wore trousers and carried guns, the cities were full of campesinos (peasants) and the city people went to the countryside to teach people how to read and write.

“I would have liked to see one of those projectors they used to take films up into the mountains, or a copy of that edition of ‘El Quijote’ that was practically given away on every corner,” said a 53-year-old Cuban woman who left the museum unsatisfied.

According to Clavijo, rather than summarising or “covering” the decade, the museum aimed to catch the “spirit” of an era which decisively influenced “a large part of those born in the first half of the 20th century and even those who were born some years later.”

The early part of the decade saw the opening of cultural centres like the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, the Cuban National Ballet and the ‘Casa de las Americas’ (House of the Americas). The National Museum of Fine Arts theatre hosted the debut of Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodríguez.

The era was captured in the photographs of Alberto Díaz (Korda), José Antonio Figueroa, Guillermo López (Chinolope) and Mario García Joya. The camera also caught the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the birth of friendship with the former Soviet Union and the growing enmity with Washington.

For Cubans, these were also years of an offensive against anything counter-revolutionary. The Beatles were banned, homosexuals and religious communities were repressed, and there was a first mass exodus out of Cuba.

“Maybe it was the incessant pressure of this political climate, in which each person showed their best and worst, which made the ideological battle and its variants in that initial stage so complex. Generosity and meanness could follow one after the other and also coincide,” wrote Fornet.

Similarly, he stated “anyone supporting the project for a different society, unreservedly and with daily sacrifice, could, in the name of this same project, be intolerant towards those demanding their right to be different.”